Book Review: Fundamental Forces of Nature

Kerson Huang, an MIT emitus professor and prolific author of physics textbooks, has written a semi-popular account of gauge field theory: Fundamental Forces of Nature: The Story of Gauge Fields. Semi-popular is his description, and it starts from the fundamentals (Newton's Second Law) but it does include equations, including lagrangians for the standard model.

I suppose that a proper reviewer would try to figure out who would benefit from such a book. Certainly there would be a lot lost on anyone who had never seen vector and tensor notation, met a lagrangian, or heard of a group. Huang helpfully notes that those who don't understand the math can just read the words, appreciating the book "just as one might enjoy a foreign movie without the subtitles." Hmmm? In any case, it was a pretty good book for me, a physicist who doesn't remember quantum field theory very well, and learned most of what little he did before the gauge revolution.

He does attempt to develop the ideas carefully, but he just states the key equations, with very little development or demonstration. I very much like his discussions of gauge invariance and renormalization. I also find his ideas on unresolved questions in physics interesting.

A few odd errors creep in, e.g., pg. 177:

In 1975, Martin Perl discovered the tau, a spin 1/2 fermion with more than a thousand times the mass of a proton...

Actually, it's not quite twice as heavy as a proton, and it's hard to guess what he was thinking when he wrote that. The tau is more than 3000 times the mass of the electron, the lightest charged lepton, so that might be the best candidate.

There is a bit of history, and pictures of the main physicists who contributed to gauge theory.

I quite like the book overall, and recommend it at least to physics students who have met a lagrangian but never quite mastered QFT. There might possibly even be some insights for those who think they know QFT moderately well.

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